It was Erykah Badu who said, “I’m an artist, and I am sensitive about my artist *ish!”—this was her infamous ‘lead in’ statement before singing what became one of her most celebrated hit songs, Tyrone. Well, like Ms. Badu, I am an academic, and I too as a Black male scholar am sensitive about my academic “ish”. Perhaps what has been one of the most sensitive and tender places in my life as an academic is the disparate and duplicitous treatment of the research that is advanced by scholars who represent gender, ethnic, racial, and sexual diversity.
Problematic for diverse faculty, particularly Black faculty, is whether their research is consumed, discussed, and cited. While the consumption and discussion aspects of their research can often be tepid, it is the citation aspect that can be absolutely frigid and duplicitous. 
Barbara Garcia-Powel
What my doctoral advisee Barbara Garcia Powell and I have coined are the Seven Citational Dispositionalities that illuminate various manifestations of how research and scholarly citations advanced by Black scholars has been marginalized: citational injustice, citational erasure, citational exclusion, citational equivocation, citational gentrification, citational disparity, and citational racism.
At the heart of what we are exploring and seeking to provide is some form of actionable redress for the glaring lack of citational justice that unequivocally influences the professional advancement and success of Black faculty, researchers, and scholars in the Academy.
In an article titled "The Rise of Citational Justice", Christen Smith, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Texas Austin chronicled her dismay when she discovered while attending a national conference, her research was being highlighted—without any reference to her as the author. According to Kwon (2022), “….Smith was at a conference in October 2017 when she felt a familiar jolt of frustration. A presenter showed a slide with passages that had been paraphrased from one of her books—and, to her dismay, had failed to credit her” (para 1).
Smith’s experience served as the bellwether for other diverse scholars—particularly Black women—to pay closer attention to who was being cited, and who was being overlooked. The outcome of Smith’s and this growing collective of Black women’s efforts was to bring to light the citational erasure and exclusion that had become a thorny and persistent problem. Subsequently, an emergent movement took form that was aimed at addressing issues related to disparities and inequities in citations. In November 2017, Smith founded the #CiteBlackWomen movement, which expanded through the Cite Black Women Collective (Makhulu & Smith, 2022). The #CiteBlackWomen and the Cite Black Women Collective are race-gender projects that have been designed to provide a safe space to continue the conversation about the “logics of silencing and invisibilization” that led to the citational erasure of Black women (Makhulu & Smith, 2022, p. 178). Since its founding, the Cite Black Women movement, has expanded to major social media platforms, and now includes a podcast, blog, and website (https://www.citeblackwomencollective.org/). In kind, the #BlackCitesMatter movement seeks to addresses the racial exclusions of Black scholarship in academia.
Dr. Fred A. Bonner II
